“There’s nothing so dreadful about Tod. I don’t like the way you speak about him. It sounds as if he was idiotic or deformed. I like him more than I do almost any one. I respect him, too. And then,” she added, in one of her uncontrollable bursts of candor, “there’s nobody else wants to marry me.”
Gault gave an annoyed ejaculation. The carriage turned from the main thoroughfare and began jolting over the cobbles of a paved street.
“Then wait till somebody better does,” he said. “Heavens, Letitia! to think of you, that I’ve always looked upon as a model of reason and sense and intelligence, throwing yourself away like this, when five-ten years from now will be time enough for you to marry.”
“I’ll be twenty-seven next month,” replied Letitia, with her ruthless regard for veracity.
The carriage here stopped at a high-stooped porch, and the coachman, alighting, delivered Letitia’s message. While they waited, silence rested between its occupants, and continued when they were once more rattling over the uneven cobbles toward the wider street they had recently left.
Darkness had settled by this time, and the lamps were breaking out in every direction, the long lines of the rain looking like threads of glass against their light. The force of the storm was augmenting. The drops beat on the top of the carriage with a drumming, pugnacious violence, and now and then dashed across the window. There were already pools in the hollows of the pavement, and from bent gutter-pipes long ribbons of water, torn by the gusts, sprang down on unwary passers-by.
Letitia took her handkerchief and rubbed away the moisture on the pane. She was looking out on the spectacle of the swimming streets with apparent interest. The conversation had not been resumed. She had nothing more to say, and Gault sat back in his corner immersed in silent thought. Once he had asked her if her engagement to Tod was a fully accomplished and recognized fact. To this she had replied that it was not, exactly, as Tod was to receive her final answer on the following Sunday, but that as far as she was concerned it was a settled thing.
Leaning back in the darkened corner, Gault bitterly inveighed against the social system which allows such a mismating; against the narrowing laws of conventionality which had fettered so strong a spirit as Letitia; above all, against that weakness of the woman which makes life alone so impossible to her unsufficing and dependent spirit. What a fate for this creature, so rich and tender in her splendid womanhood! Letitia to make such a marriage—Letitia, whom nature had designed to be some strong man’s guide and solace, to be the queen of a gracious home, the mother of tall sons and blooming daughters! It was a sacrilege.
The carriage rolled out upon Market Street, amid a din of car-bells and the roar of intersecting streams of traffic. The outlines of the high newspaper buildings were hazy in the blur of the rain, but their illuminated windows seemed dotting the sky far up toward the zenith, where they burst into a splutter of lights. From every point cars seemed to be advancing, with their lanterns shooting rays through the wet, and stretches of pavement and pools of water gave forth sudden gleams. The whole scene, lights magnified and outlines erased by the rain, had a chaotic, broken effect of glaring radiance and softly dark, looming vagueness.
Letitia again rubbed the window and leaned forward. Her companion could see the outline of her head against the light, as if it were a silhouette backgrounded with gold-leaf. Why should he not marry her? Would he not be a better mate for her than the witless and sickly boy to whom she intended binding her blooming youth, for whom she would pour out the treasures of her heart and reveal the sacred places of a nature that he could never understand or appreciate?